anonymous gallery presents a new series of works by Cristine Brache exploring persona, lost potential, and mortality through the figure of Dorothy Stratten. This body of work also continues Brache’s inquiry into power dynamics, femininity, and the tension between presence and erasure. Dorothy Stratten, a Canadian actress and model, rose to fame as a Playboy Playmate in 1979 and Playmate of the Year in 1980, embodying both desire and projection. Poised to become Hollywood’s next Marilyn Monroe, her life was violently cut short at the age of 20 by her estranged husband and manager, Paul Snider. Brache presents Stratten as an unresolved cultural presence, suspended between emergence and loss.
The presentation features four large-scale encaustic portraits, drawn from centerfolds and publicity shoots where Stratten meets the camera directly. Unlike Brache’s Playboy Bunny series, where women pose candidly, for themselves, these images hold a performative, yet detached gaze. Beneath it lingers an unrehearsed dissociation, a haunting trace of harm from her past. The encaustic medium, with its layered translucence, like cultural memory, preserves and distorts. A suspension between legibility and disappearance, the paintings oscillate between opacity and clarity, mirroring the sedimentation of image over time in the same cadence as cultural memory.
A video, displayed on an obsolete TV monitor, reworks Stratten’s 1980 Tonight Show appearance. Slowed footage, overlaid with a spectral second layer, creates a ghostly afterimage. An AI voice recites Stratten’s 1979 poem, replacing her real voice to surface an interiority once hidden beneath her media persona. The work blurs presence and absence, showing media simultaneously as a tool of preservation and obsolescence. A third element, an acrylic and marble door sculpture, references Duchamp’s Étant donnés. The door, adorned with card suits—like a game—leads to a keyhole where viewers glimpse a time-lapse video of blooming and wilting roses. This act of voyeurism mimics Stratten’s own mediated image, always observed, never fully accessible. As the flowers wither and—the flickering screen of the vintage monitor struggles to sustain Stratten’s image—Brache employs nature and obsolete media as a metaphor for the obsolescence of anything: the body, memory, cultural figures once illuminated and inevitably dimmed by the passage of time.
Brache avoids reconstructing Stratten’s narrative, instead highlighting the psychic dissonance within her image. Layering and distortion create a tension between preservation and dissolution, reflecting the instability of memory and the estrangement of self from representation. But ultimately, Brache insists on Stratten’s presence, elevating her to the cultural status that was meant to be hers, not as a tragedy but as an unfinished possibility. Like Monroe, Stratten’s image endures, but where Monroe’s repetition in Warhol’s work cemented her place in the pantheon of icons, Stratten’s cultural afterlife remains in flux. Brache captures this paradox: Stratten as both cipher and individual, deeply known yet forever unknowable.
As Stratten wrote in her poem:
It’s here, everything—
Everything anyone ever
Dreamed of, and more.
But love is lost:
The only sacrifice
To live in this heaven,
This Disneyland
Where people are the games.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Cristine Brache is a New York-based artist, writer, and filmmaker of Cuban and Puerto Rican heritage. She received her MFA in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Brache predominantly works in encaustic painting, sculpture, and film, often using obsolete media, acrylic, readymades, and textiles. Her work circulates around constructs of the female body and psyche, broken histories, masking, and the inevitable power dynamics accompanying these themes. The artist is also interested in mortality, nostalgia, and solitude.
Select solo exhibitions include those held at anonymous gallery (New York); Locust Projects (Miami); and Anat Ebgi (Los Angeles). She has exhibited internationally at galleries and institutions like Berlinische Galerie, Perez Art Museum Miami, and ICA Miami. Her films have screened in festivals like the Florida Film Festival (Orlando); Miami Film Festival (Miami); and Slamdance (Park City). Her work has been critically reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Cristine Brache .